Jamie Dornan had a terrifying run-in with some toxic caterpillars during a recent vacation to Portugal, as his friend Gordon Smart revealed on the BBC’s The Good, the Bad, and the Unexpected podcast on January 12. The Scottish broadcaster, 43, shared the story about a terrifying trip to the emergency room that he and the actor, 41, had during a golf vacation.
Before revealing that Jamie had come down with the same thing, Gordon said that he experienced the same symptoms during a “golfing holiday” with a few friends. He revealed that at first he thought he’d been hungover from a night of excessive drinking, but checked in to the hospital to be safe. “I found myself in [a] hospital in Portugal, thinking I was having a heart attack,” he said on the show. “The next day we played golf. We were all absolutely dreadful. I started to feel tingling in my left hand, tingling in my left arm. I’ve been the son of a GP. I thought, ‘This is normally the sign of the start of a heart attack.'”
Gordon said that he went to the hospital and saw that the 50 Shades of Grey star was also hospitalized. “As I was lying there, one of the other lads I was with went passed on a hospital bed with doctors shouting the same questions to him. I thought, ‘That’s not a good sign that he’s in the same state as me,'” he said. “I got out of the hospital, and my mate turned up back, and his name happens to be Jamie Dornan, Hollywood star.”
The radio broadcaster revealed that Jamie had the same symptoms as he did, and had a bit of a unique encounter with the medical practitioners. “There he was with all of this stuff attached to his chest, saying, ‘Damn Gordon. About 20 minutes after you left, my left arm went numb, my left leg went numb, my right leg went numb, and I found myself in the back of an ambulance,'” he said. “As he left [the] hospital, the paramedics asked him for a selfie, which isn’t really what you want when you’re being wheeled out of a hospital room.”
Gordon revealed that after he returned home from the trip, the doctor got in touch with him and sent him an article about Pine processionary moth caterpillars, which seemed to cause the symptoms. “It turns out that there are caterpillars golf courses in the south of Portugal that have been killing people’s dogs and giving men in their 40s heart attacks. It turns out we’d brushed up against hairy processionary caterpillars and had been very lucky to come out of that one alive,” he said. “It wasn’t a caffeine overdose. It wasn’t a hangover. It was a poisonous, toxic caterpillar.”